This sounds like a crazy question, after all, is there anything simpler than giving things away for free? In fact, there is another question hidden behind: Why do I want to give things away for free? Why giving things away for free will determine how one should give away things for free.
Then why would a business want to give away things for free?
The answer is that the future demand for a particular good depends on whether the consumer is using this good in the current period. There are several reasons why current usage will determine future usage. The most common reason is "experience goods" that is, before trying this good, the consumer has no idea how good and how useful this good is. The rational motivates giving away samples for new products.
The second reason is network effect. For example, LinkedIn is only useful if there are many professional on this platform. However, if one charges a price to every professional, many professional will simply refuse to get on the Platform. By offering free basic services to all professionals, LinkedIn is able to increase its base dramatically. 1
The third reason is addiction. I will delay the discussion in the specific example later.
With so many reasons to give things away for free, why would anyone not give things away for free? Duh, because blindly giving things away for free actually decreases consumers' willingness to pay, which is the opposite of our goal. Even a temporary free giving-away might anchor consumers' expectation. This has two consequence. It lead to stronger resistance when the firm transitions to paid services; It incentivize consumers to delay purchase and wait for free offers (eg. sales and discounts). In other words, it could self-canabalizing. I for example, whenever purchasing on Amazon, would look at its price trajectory, and figure out that I can expect that Amazon will discount it to price x with 90% confidence. I will set up an automatic alert when the price on Amazon does fall to or below x.
My favorite example of giving things for free is Dropbox. Let us start with the basic. It is a freemium business, except it is different. Users are given some free space account when they sign up. The amount of free space is fixed, only nominally. The capacity of the first disk drive, the IBM 350 disk storage unit, is only 3.75MB. The typical hard disk we use today, is probably around 1TB.2 This is a a quarter million to one change, and mirrors the inflation of file size we experienced. I still remember those days in middle school when I would use a 3.5-inch floppy disk, which has accomodates about 1.5MB. Today, even if it is still compatible with my computer, I would find a floppy disk completely useless, because the real 1.5MB has been "inflated away". It is fair to say, in real terms, Dropbox is chipping away the size of free space every year. By inflating the free space away, it avoids the thorny problems of generating resistance or at least annoying consumers.
There is also wisdom in continuously and slowly inflating size away. When the size of free space is reduced in one stroke, one will have more incentive to find alternative storage services; however, when the consumer find himself just slightly above the limit every month or so, that incentive is greatly reduced, similar to the "boiling frog" story. In addition, the asynchrony of hitting the limits among users poses a challenge to coordinate migrating to alternative platform.
What really brings my attention to Dropbox is actually an email from them, informing me due to a technical problem that have affected me (I was not even aware of it), they are giving me one year of Dropbox Pro for FREE, that is 1TB for free for one year:
We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused. To thank you for bearing with us, we're giving you Dropbox Pro for free for one year starting today, October 10, 2014. If you have any questions, please reply to this message or email us at selectivesync@dropbox.com. We’re here to help.
This is excellent, maybe for me, but definitely for them. For one thing, they made it clear this is just a compensation, so it avoids anchoring consumers' expectation in any way---it is just my lucky day. More importantly, it could potentially convert me from a free riders to a paid customer. Here is why. First, the technical problem was Selective Sync. It is reasonable to expect that whoever uses that function derives more value from an average user and probably deal with larger data files. Good targeting. Second, addiction to a service is present here. There is a Chinese saying "It is easy to transition from a poor life to a rich one, but the reverse is much harder". There is some psychological cost to transition from knowing no limits to living under stringent limits. This cost, is often unanticipated by consumers.
Beyond the psychological aspect, there is a more rational or orthodox source of addiction. It might seem weird to talk about addiction to an IT service/product, but it is very relevant in this area. Let me take the least consumer-facing product--VMware's ESX, a hypervisor technology. Swapping out ESX for alternatives are exactly hard, but many companies use the management tool designed for ESX, and they build their operations around that. These are the real switching costs.3 Dropbox is no different. When one is granted free access, the natural response is to use the heck out of it, after all, he reasons:"I probably will never get as lucky". He figures out all the bells and whistles of using Dropbox, what a fun! Dropbox is after all an extremely useful service, and everyone can find so many uses of it. From my perspective, I might want to use it to collaborate with other people on research. Imagine one year later, my pro service is over. I still have a couple of collaboration in progress. No, I cannot leave Dropbox. How could I propose to my collaborator that we find an alternative despite its great performance and just because I am a cheapo? The bottom line is it is very hard to switch collaboration platforms. There is a psychological aspect to it: people tends to overly discount the future cost (of moving their files away and switching to another sync service when their account expire) vis-a-vis the utility they gain from using Dropbox in the current period (a phenomenon known as time inconsistency). In other words, I would think to myself that I will simply move all my files back to hard disk when my pro service expires, but when the time comes, I will instead choose to pay for continued pro service. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that people on average tend to underestimate the cost of making the transition back (planning fallacy).
I had to say, it is a most brilliant move. I am very impressed. The only sad ending to the story is that: knowing my time-inconsistency problem, I am not taking advantage of the free offering. I am only using 0.6% of the 1TB.4
1 In this example, free basic services is a permanent feature for LinkedIn, but one can imagine a platform only provides free service during mobilization stage. For example, google search offered ad-free search in the beginning and then incorporated ads when it became dominant. In some sense, google started to charge us in terms of "attention fee".↩
3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_hard_disk_drives↩
3 Yoffie, David, Andrei Hagiu and Michael Slind, “VMware, Inc., 2008,” HBS No. 9-709-435 (Boston: Harvard Business School Publishing, 2010), p.15↩
4 If this surprises you, here is a even more surprising story. In sophomore year, I was lucky to get a dingle---a double dorm room occupied only by me. What I did? I limited myself and belongs to only half of the room (using bookcase and bed to block my use of the other half), so that I 1)will not accumulate too many belongs that I have to get ride of later 2)will not get used to having a huge room and face the difficult transition of being confined to a much smaller room the next year.↩
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